If you need to know entity-reference boundaries, you can get that information by asking the parser to generate a DOM which has Entity Reference Nodes and then looking at the children of the attribute nodes. (I'm not sure offhand whether there's a SAX equivalent.)
If you want to suppress the other kinds of normalization applied to attributes, I would suggest that you don't want attributes in the first place. Change your document design so this information is carried by a child element. (See much past discussion -- just about everywhere that XML is discussed! -- about when to use attributes vs. child elements; this is one classic example where there is a practical reason rather than just one of style.) ______________________________________ "... Three things see no end: A loop with exit code done wrong, A semaphore untested, And the change that comes along. ..." -- "Threes" Rev 1.1 - Duane Elms / Leslie Fish ( http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/threes-rev-11.html)
